In a country proud of its Christian roots, the growing phenomenon of selective abortion is harming the unborn.
Each year, 1400 baby girls do not make it to birth: a taboo for the Orthodox Church.
With over 114 males to 100 females at birth, when normal proportions should never exceed a ratio of 105 to 100, it is not a country for girls.
It would seem like a case of selective abortion - the sad practice of terminating the pregnancy when it is discovered that the fetus is a girl - which we have read about so many times from India or China.
And this is exactly the phenomenon we are talking about.
But this time it turns out to be very common in a country like Armenia – a land very proud of its Christian roots, which usually makes headlines for the memory of the genocide at the beginning of the twentieth century in the name of this Christian identity.
The alarm was sounded some weeks ago by the Council of Europe, which passed a resolution condemning the practice of selective abortion, citing the fact that this tragedy is also widespread in the Balkans.
A few days later, the issue was taken up in an exposé by Armenian journalist Nanoro Barsoumian, published in the Armenian Weekly.
The picture that emerges is very disturbing: the combination of a tradition of easy abortion inherited from the years of the Soviet Union in Armenia, and a still very-deeply rooted mentality that is not exactly friendly toward women, are driving the country’s levels of imbalance between the sexes at birth to approach Chinese levels. Behind these numbers also lie completely illegal - but apparently tolerated - practices: in fact, in Armenia, abortion is only allowed before the twelfth week, before knowing the sex of the unborn child.
The Armenian section of UNFPA (The United Nations Population Fund) provide an estimate: there are at least 1,400 girls each year in the country who are never born, simply because they were recognized as females on the ultrasound.
The Nanoro Barsoumian article has provoked a lively debate among readers on the Armenian Weekly site, and more than one of them has questioned the silence of the local patriarchate on such an important issue. Moreover, Armenians love to point out that they were the first to adopt Christianity as a State religion: as early as 301 A.D., in fact - twelve years before Constantine’s Edict - King Tiridates was converted to the Gospel, which in Armenia, according to tradition, was first spread by the Apostles Bartholomew and Jude Thaddeus.
And the Armenian Apostolic Church (the Ancient Eastern Church took a different path than Rome in the days of the Council of Chalcedon) was for centuries the bulwark of identity for these people with such a troubled history.
Official statistics classify more than 98 percent of Armenians as Christians (though we cannot forget the legacy of mass atheism promoted here during the time of Soviet communism). Like many Eastern Churches, however, the Armenian Church also has always been very reluctant to publicly condemn abortion.
In 1995, expanding on a question asked by the Washington Post during a trip to the United States, then-head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Karekin I, explained: “We do not emit dogmatic pronouncements or impositions of principles. When a person is nourished by Christianity and his conscience is formed by Christian principles, that person must be free to address specific issues such as abortion. The Church should not be involved in this type of detail. Jesus never forced anything on his disciples.”
This attitude does not seem to have changed with his successor Karekin II, Catholicos of Armenians since 1999.
In his recent Christmas message, released on January 6, he criticized the modern world “burdened with difficulties, hardships, contradictions, and man-made conflicts.”
He also added that “the rejection of Christ and his commandments gives rise to wars and tragedies, threatens our planet, causes a weakening of the soul and spirit, as in the violent disruption of life given by God.”
In relation to those last words, however, he offered only two examples: murder and suicide.
The issue of unborn children, evidently, is still a taboo for the Armenian Apostolic Church.